Are Drug Cartels Buying Costa Rican Police?

Costa Rica – Over the past months there have been several instances where it looked like the local police officers in Costa Rica shrugged their duties when it comes to law enforcement of drug related activities. Yes turtle egg poaching has now become a drug related activity.

“Mexican TV Crew”

We will start with an instance of a “Mexican TV Crew” that was bringing kilos of coke and over 9 million dollars through Nicaragua into Costa Rica. They were stopped at the Nicaraguan border, searched and arrested. Everyone in Costa Rica was publicizing the bust and talking about how this was a step in the right direction when it came to starting to patrol the drug trafficking in Costa Rica.

This bust was not done in Costa Rica it was done in Nicaragua. A Nicaraguan judge sentenced the 18 Mexicans who posed as members of a television crew to 30 years in prison for drug trafficking and money laundering stemming from $9.2 million found in their vans.

This group was tied back to one of the biggest drug cartels in Mexico. They were on their way to Costa Rica which has become a safe haven for them. Multiple criminals have stated over the past year that the goal is to get to Costa Rica, because they are able to move around quite freely and with a little cash can get out of any problems.

Jairo Mora and the Park Volunteer

The murder of Jairo Mora shot through the press and the Costa Rican government was both slow to act and have not shown the need to expedite this case and show the world they are willing to start addressing the true problem of turtle egg poaching and the drug trade that is associated with it. Jairo was interviewed about the problem with the cartels and the drug trade associated with the turtle eggs only about a month before his death…….does anyone think this is a coincidence?

Just in the last 7 days a park volunteer was stabbed in the groin by a would be turtle egg poacher. The local authorities did not question the culprit and set him free. None of these local police were questioned about not performing their job and received no punishment.

Although arrests have been made in the murder of Jairo Mora, the main problem of turtle egg poaching and the drug trade associated with it has not been addressed. It is as if the Costa Rican government just hopes it will go away with time. Because of the lack of any kind of attention span of most people in the world, it has been swept under the rug.

The Drug Jet Flight

President Laura Chinchilla traveled twice on Gabriel Morales Fallon’s jet. The jet of the Colombian with alleged links to drug trafficking. The head of intelligence and security, Mauricio Boraschi, and presidential aide Irene Pacheco stepped down on after it was found out that the jet had drug trafficking ties followed by Communications Minister Francisco Chacon.

These 3 seemed to be sacrificial lambs to protect the president, whether or not that is true remains to be seen but with everything else going on it seems too coincidental.

Mexican Cartels Buying Local Police

Mexican authorities said at a forum that drug-trafficking gangs pay around 1.27 billion pesos (some $100 million) a month in bribes to municipal police officers throughout Mexico. They are able to do this quite easily with the low salaries these officers receive. If an officer is trying to support his family going from $400 a month to possibly $1000 a month provides a better lifestyle to his family. The temptation is too great for many officers.

Nearly 30,000 people have died in incidents blamed on organized-crime groups, mainly drug traffickers, in Mexico since late 2006, when newly inaugurated President Felipe Calderon deployed tens of thousands of soldiers and federal police to nearly a dozen states in a bid to stem the violence and root-out corruption in local law-enforcement agencies.

The question that needs to be asked now is are the cartels slowly doing the same thing in Costa Rica? And how high up the ladder have they already gone?